Letters to David Irving on
this Website

Unless
correspondents ask us not to, this Website will
post selected letters that it receives and invite
open debate.

Paul
Sweet
comments, Monday, June 25, 2007, on the British Army beating
up Field Marshal Erhard Milch on his capture

Luftwaffe
field marshal Erhard Milch sentenced to life imprisonment by
the Americans at Nuremberg. At his side, his lawyer Dr
Friedrich Bergold.

Treatment
of captured high-ranking prisoners

I HAVE read today your article on the
bashing of FM Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe by a
British brigadier that you identify as Brig. Derek
Mills-Roberts, DSO, of the Commandos, and I found it
abominable that a British general officer would stoop to
such outrageously base and cowardly malicious conduct
against a captured officer.

However,
for all my disgust, I am not really surprised that a
high-ranking British army officer (or a British soldier,
sailor, or airman of any rank, for that matter) should vent
his spleen on an invalided German officer. The British are
simply that kind of people.

I have always maintained that the British in war (or
peace if you include instances of football hooliganism) are
a particularly vindictive, hateful, and nastily chauvinistic
lot motivated less by a sense of professional duty or
conviction (unlike the Germans) than by a spiteful hatred
and deep malice.

The Germans were generally better soldiers, man for man,
than their enemies and in the case of the British, the
Germans were to be punished and made to pay for having
committed the worst of all crimes against the British
nation: being the moral, physical, and tactical superior to
the British soldier in battle and for having the temerity to
inflict physical defeat at both a tactical level and
strategic level on the British army.

The absolute malicious and murderous intent against
German civilians (noncombatants) behind the area-bombing
campaign prosecuted by the aptly nicknamed "Butcher"
Harris, the persistent unlawful killing of German
prisoners of war in the field (especially by members of such
units as the Parachute Regiment and the Commandos, be they
from the Army, Navy, or Royal Marines), the atrocities
committed against German civilians (noncombatants once
again) in the invasion of western Germany by members of
Montgomery's 21st Army Group, including the strafing by
aircraft of the 2nd Tactical Air Force of German refugee
columns composed almost entirely of civilians, mostly women
and children (those damned noncombatants yet again), and the
list goes on.

It is clear to this reader of military history that
during the Second World War, the British were not an
honourable enemy in fighting against the Germans. Indeed,
Britannia's sons were far too often far less honourable than
their more detached and professionally-motivated European
enemy, the Germans. It is clear to me at least that German
soldiers in the field frequently behaved far more decently
and honourably towards defeated enemies than the British
ever would.

And yet the Germans are slandered and libelled to this
day as the villains of the piece, as "war criminals", and a
host of other morally-offensive terms cast in their face
when in fact they were frequently the moral superiors to so
many of their enemies, east or west, including, it seems, a
British brigadier. Victis vae is sadly a fact of life
for Germany and the German nation.

I am pleased, Mr Irving, for the contributions you have
made in your books in trying to set the record straight and
to redress this appalling and massive imbalance of opinion
against the German people which is based on nothing more
than
the propaganda of yesteryear, the distortion of historical
events by vested interests, and both the overt and covert
falsification of history by those same interests. It is
certainly my hope that one day the full truth concerning the
Second World War will be known and that it gains the widest
possible currency. The truth deserves nothing less.